Harbour City Star from Nanaimo, British Columbia, Canada • 30

rj" ett3 -pa 'c-Ta -p -j" era B6 The Star Saturday, July 12, 2008 3 nS Ml ttnni i-as it mi i wlL Jo IN BRIEF 1 XL uu 1 i bm Public appreciative but critics are panning the opera PETER O'NEIL CANWEST NEWS SERVICE 1 1 I 1 7 i I i i I "a 1, 1 I 1 Dawson bullet is TV show's secret What happened to Hay-der Kadhim on Sept. 13, 2006 is no secret in Montreal where the Dawson College shooting shook this city. But Kadhim undoubtedly hopes his fellow contestants on a popular reality television show in France haven't caught wind of his ordeal. One of the survivors of the Dawson College attack, Kadhim is now holed up in a "house of secrets" in Paris with 14 other contestants on Secret Story, a program on the private French TF1 network. The contestants are trying to find out one another's secret and vying for a prize of 1 50,000 euros about $240,000.

The show did not provide a spokesman for comment Tuesday, but confirmed Kadhim's secret is that he still has a bullet in his head. The show began airing on June 27 and is broadcast daily. Contestants are sequestered at a house in Paris and a winner will be decided at the end of August. TV revenues not too healthy now Revenue from conventional television fell last year for the first time in a decade but revenues from pay and specialty television continued to rise Statistics Canada said on Tuesday. Public and non-commercial conventional television was hardest hit by the slowdown, the federal agency, adding that both advertising revenue and grants suffered.

Private conventional television recovered slightly in 2007 following stagnation in revenues a year earlier. However, the sector was hampered by a weak advertising market in 2007, It depends on advertising sales for about 94 of annual revenues. Looking at the entire television sector, advertising revenues increased by just 1.8 in 2007 the smallest rise in a decade. At the same time, the share of private conventional television continued to decline, Statistics Canada said. NEWSSERVICES rench critics are pan- mug 1 tie ny, cm upei- atic adaptation of the Canadian director David Cronenberg's gruesome 1986 horror classic about a brilliant scientist who mistakenly turns himself into a half-man, half-fly.

Staged at the famous Theatre du Chatelet, where Paris's cultural elite have since the mid-19th century enjoyed appearances by classical music legends like Tchaikovsky and Richard Strauss, the modern opera is being warmly received by the public but sneered at by reviewers. "At intermission, after the first hour of the two-hour show, we were so bored we strongly suspected the parasitic presence of the tsetse fly," wrote Le Figaro reviewer Christian Merlin, referring to the bloodsucking African insect that causes sleeping sickness. Merlin contrasted his own dismissive assessment of The Fly with that of the appreciative, though not explosive, applause of the audiences at the theatre. "We were promised a modern work. Here is a show stuck in dust-covered convention.

The public liked French headline-writers had a field day with housefly puns. "The Fly: how annoying," declared Le Figaro, while the headline of Le Monde's scathing review concluded that La Mouch'e, as it is called in French, "doesn't fly." The opera, which plays until July 13 in Paris before moving to Los Angeles in September, is directed by Cronenberg, with music by his longtime collaborator Howard Shore. It is based on the 1986 Cronenberg film (scored by Shore) which in turn was inspired by a 1957 short story by French writer George Langelaan, which was turned into a B-movie the following year. The Fly is the story of a brilliant but socially awkward scientist, Seth Brundle, whose invention to "change the world as we know it" allows people and things to be "teleported" from one "telepod" in his laboratoryapartment to another. After meeting and falling in love with Veronica Quaife, a beautiful journalist who wants to document his work, he decides while in a jealous and drunken rage to become the first human subject.

But a fly lands in the telepod just as he disrobes and enters, and in the process of disassembling and reassembling Brundle, the computer fuses the DNA of both '4 1 3 i idea that he was only composing a musical, he took pains to analyze the structure of an opera and to abide by the requirements of duos, quartets, choruses and leitmotif. "His lack of experience and imagination is only more cruelly, felt," wrote Liberation's Eric Dahan. Le Figaro, describing the music as a "monotonous mess," praised the two lead actors, Okulitch and Ruxandra Donose, who plays Veronica. But the reviewer noted that they played their roles "with a fervour inversely proportional to the quality of the music they had to defend." Le Monde, meanwhile, described the "lifeless" and "boring" music -that bounds liketr pieceofhomt work, clumsily orchestrated." French audiences may like some strange stuff (i.e. Jerry Lewis), but 'The Fly a Canadian-dominated operatic adaptation of the gruesome 1986 horror classic by director David Cronenberg doesn't seem to be one of them.

The tale of a brilliant scientist who mistakenly turns himself into a half-man, half-fly, opened in France recently. Seth 'Brundlefly' Brundle, is played by bass-baritone Daniel Okulitch, 32, above, who was born in Ottawa and grew up in Calgary, canwest news service. whose hand and foot are dissolved by Brundlefly's toxic saliva.) Other Canadians in the production include baritone Luc Lalonde, special effects and makeup specialist Stephan Dupuis, and costumes designer Denise Cronenberg, the director's sister. Reviewers, while giving positive assessments of the lead actors' performances as well as the musical direction of the Radio France Philharmonic Orchestra by Spanish opera star Placido Domingo, had little positive to say about the overall result. Facing particularly biting criticism was Shore, who according to one critic overestimated his ability to adapt his cinematic skills for the first time to a stage Brundle and the fly.

For the rest of the film Brundle evolves into an increasingly hideous man-fly, with tragic consequences. The opera is a big-name, Canadian-dominated international effort led by Cronenberg and Shore, who won three Oscars for his work scoring The Lord of the Rings film trilogy. Seth "Brundlefly" Brundle, is played by bass-baritone Daniel Okulitch, 32, who was born in Ottawa and grew up in Calgary. Another key character in The Fly, Veronica's obsessively jealous boss and ex-lover Stathis, is played by Canadian tenor David Curry. (At the Theatre du Chatelet, this character is spared the gory tate" of his counterpart in the 1986 film, production: "As though warding off the.